2. For Activating Sense and Power of Words

Our nation has traditionally emphasized the importance of human virtues. Such words as ‘loyalty’, ‘filial piety’, and ‘fraternity’ based upon ‘three fundamental principles and five moral precepts’(三綱五倫) ard hard to accept wholly because they functioned as the ruling logic of the past, but all of them can become everlasting virtues if we transform them to be suitable for a new society and era. Actually, if we practice the meanings of these words rightly, we can simultaneously make the most of all virtues--love, faithfulness, tenacity, patience, forgiveness, concession, sacrifice, and service--from these words.

Meanwhile, we have excessively respected Western values and functionalism, and as a result, we have almost lost the value of our traditional virtues. When we did not vitalize the inner value of ‘filial piety’ and ‘fraternity’, and made little of parents and brothers, the order of home and society became broken; when we did not rightly understand the true meaning of ‘liberty’, we drifted to license without responsibility and duty; when we failed to live by the precious meaning of ‘equality’, we were all caught in an unfortunate atmosphere of downward levelling reduced to shallowness.

This does not always mean that Western virtues are unconditionally wrong. Rather, it all depends upon whether we rightly practice them or not. For example, if we practice the meaning of ‘equality’ to spread such virtues as ‘culture’, ‘dignity’, ‘manners’, ‘order’, ‘concession’, and ‘courage’, the conscious standard of all people will develop toward upward levelling; otherwise, it will go back toward downward levelling. Such a nation or society will nation or society will naturally sink into a snobbish way of thinking.

The author will exemplify a concrete case in which a grand word is now being used as a shallow word. The abstract word ‘honorable’ basically means the state of nobility. Thus teachers or adults teach children to become noble. In this case the meaning of ‘a noble man’ briefly indicates ‘a man of dignity’. We can apply this word ‘dignity’ only to a man who lives and practices his own virtue with learning, art, and morality. Hence, the word has nothing to do with what wordly people think of such as money, power, and status, etc. It is this word ‘dignity’ that we can use to designate such saints as Jesus, Buddha, and Confucian. Such men of dignity can only be called honorable men.

In this world there are in fact many outstanding scholars, many great religious men, many well-known artists. They are obvious outstanding, great, and well-known men. However, they are not always honorable men with dignity. By the way, people frequently take an honorable state for money, power, and status or confuse its meaning with being outstanding, great, and well-known. A President, a member of the National Assembly, a professor may be very outstanding, great, and well-known, but it is hard to regard all of them as honorable men without exception.

Take the case of a teacher who, upon retirement, tells a journalist that he is proud of his teaching profession because among his students there are many ‘honorable’ men such as members of the National Assembly, judges, prosecutors, and professors- even though he is no more than a humble teacher. He seems absent-mindedly to take his students with power or status for ‘honorable’ men, but this is certainly wrong.

As the meaning of the word ‘honorabel’ is mixed with that of words such as ‘outstanding’, ‘great’, and ‘well-known’, our society tends to give undue respect to money, power, and status which are by nature ephemeral, like pieces of a drifting cloud. However, what is truly honorable is eternal and immortal. That is dignity. Dignity might not be obtained, even though a life-long effort were to be made. But once obtained, dignity, saints still live in human history and shed bright light in the world.